The present invention relates to methods for compiling and presenting educational, reference and training materials.
Vocabulary, and more importantly, the meaning associated with words, differs widely among individual readers. An individual's vocabulary directly affects his ability to comprehend information presented to him.
The traditional approach to the authoring and publishing of educational, reference and training materials necessarily presumes a particular level of comprehension by the reader. This assumption becomes the basis for the author's selection of vocabulary. Recognizing the problems created by this assumption, authors often include a glossary to help insure that key words and phrases are understood.
When a glossary is insufficient, it is expected that the readers will seek outside references to clarify their understanding of the material. However, when a reader becomes lost by the author's choice of words or descriptions, the time and effort required to obtain other reference material often becomes a major obstacle to meaningful continuation. Students faced with this difficulty will often "jump" over blocks of text rather than spend the time to seek out alternate descriptions in an attempt to understand the author's meaning.
A growing body of experts have confirmed that each reader is unique in the way he learns. Vocabulary is only one of the factors which affects learning differences, other factors have been identified. Bundling variations in these factors into broad groups, a manageable number of separate learning styles have been identified and are becoming the basis for separate learning material presentations. The educational community calls these styles "learning modalities." Educational psychologists suggest that effective teaching of students in these different modality groups requires a different educational approach for each. These psychologists further suggest that any one rigid presentation (such as a book, lecture, etc.) will reach less than thirty-five percent of the students, some as little as sixteen percent. They recommend that ideally, at least four entirely different approaches to education be used, one for each major modality identified (see appendix).
Thus far, the computer software which has been written for education has largely ignored the concept of learning modalities and, as a result, have limited compatibility with learners.
Computers have not been a practical alternative for presenting textual information to a student. Early mainframe computers used reel-to-reel magnetic tapes to input and store data. Early personal computers used cassette tapes for the same purpose. These tapes were used to load data from an archive onto the computer, with the data then being stored in digital memory in the computer using core memory or, more recently, random access memory (RAM) on silicon chips. The signal stored on the magnetic tape was typically a series of positive going pulses, with the positive going pulse being interpreted as a digital one and the absence of a pulse being interpreted as a digital zero. In order to transmit a stored signal over telephone lines, a modem is required to modulate an analog carrier frequency with the digital pulses.
More recently, hard disks and floppy disks have been developed to magnetically store digital data on a disk-shaped device. A disk drive could very quickly access data on any portion of the disk, thereby overcoming a major drawback of magnetic tapes, which have a slow access time. A magnetic tape would have to be wound to the proper position for input of a particular bit of data. Unfortunately, disk drives are more expensive than tape drives.
Most recently, laser disks, or compact disks, have been developed in which data are stored as a series of holes burned into a metal or plastic substrate by a laser. Such disks can store a billion bits of information on a side. Laser readers, or compact disk players, have been devised for such disks and are currently used for home music systems. A record is stored as a series of digital bits on a disk which are converted back to an analog signal by the compact disk player. Interfaces are being developed to couple such a compact disk player to personal computers so that the computers could directly accept the digital information from a compact disk. This type of a system could be used to store books on compact disks and then display them on a personal computer. Efforts continue to reduce the costs of such mass digital storage devices to make them available to the average consumer. Presently, however, none of these digital storage devices are sufficiently economical to replace the hard copy printed book.